Repeatedly acknowledging intelligence problems

Bush met today with the president of Ghana, who uttered the least credible sentence of the day: “I want to thank the President for understanding Africa.” Understands Africa? I’m surprised he’s heard of it.

The White House issued one of those amusing “Setting the Record Straight” releases, attempting to bury the WaPo story about the mobile “biological weapons labs” under a flurry of disinformation and distortion. It dismisses the DIA field report as a mere “preliminary finding,” ignoring the fact that it was, you know, accurate, says that it’s not the practice to change (false) reports by the intelligence community just because they’re contradicted by people on the ground, and ignoring the question of whether the White House was aware of the report when Bush made his statements (Scotty McClellan said today that he was “looking into that matter”.) You can read the thing and count the distortions for yourselves, including accusing the Post of saying that Bush’s only rationale for invading Iraq was WMDs, although the quote from the WaPo says no such thing. My favorite bit (and the second least credible sentence of the day): “The Administration Has Repeatedly Acknowledged Intelligence Problems And Has Taken Multiple Steps To Address Them.”

Name of the day: the new Italian parliament will include four out gays. One of them, who was re-elected, is named Titti De Simone.

Which is also her porn name.